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[lojban] Re: Lojban Scholasticism



Bob LeChevalier wrote:


I think that is part of the problem. People want to jump from Aesop's fables, which are a paragraph long, without a standard text so that people feel more free to take liberties with the wording, and then jump to novels of great length, often loaded with the sorts of odd uses of language that would tend to attract Lojbanists (no insult intended to the Alice translators).

Athelstan was wise in tackling a Saki short story 16 years ago. There are plenty of these, they are only a few pages long so they can be translated much more quickly than a novel, and they are short enough that a lot of relatively novice Lojbanists would be inclined to try to read the text (I don't expect that there will be much market for the Lojban translations of "War and Peace" or "Les Miserables" for a good while).

lojbab

I understand where you are getting to with this and I agree in principle. However. Many years ago, frustrated with trying to learn french, I decided to read 20,000 leagues under the sea. I'd picked it up at a second hand shop for a dollar. When I started I had no idea, but by the time I'd read it I could read passable french. The advantage of reading a long text using a single voice (writer) in their own style is like any repetative excercise, after a while it starts to become easier and more fluid. Though the work of an individual translator or writer may be idiomatic in form (ie englishy or obtuse when compared to a refference text) it acts as a great facilitator for learning, as the subject and narrative elements become increasingly well known and odd uses and referents can be intuited. This is not unlike how we learn natural languages, and I believe the benefit of reading of long texts (over example texts and drills) is often underestimated.

I've taken komfo,amonan(s) suggestion to heart and have downloaded la nicte cadzu for a read http://www.digitalkingdom.org/~rlpowell/hobbies/lojban/palm/la%20nicte%20cadzu/index.html

pav



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